10 ms·

I returned home from Silicon Valley and built a failed startup

120 points by aherlambang 10y ago

kaitai 10y ago
I am a bit surprised that the article doesn't have any introspection about knowing the market (or not). It seems like the reasoning was: we want some money; women have money; women buy clothes; let's do fashion. It doesn't seem like there was much of a value proposition for the customer. Maybe the customer likes browsing Instagram. Maybe the customer asks all these questions (stupid questions as well as clarifying questions) to gauge how quickly a return would be dealt with if desired, to establish some info about company knowledge and responsiveness. (Buying clothes online is risky in terms of fit and fabric quality, especially with resellers.) How could a startup cater to the features of the marketplace instead of fighting them?
- aherlambang 10y ago
  The one I wrote was an over simplification. There are of course more than that. The value proposition to the seller were clear, we wanted to give them more exposure outside of Instagram, make their store be discovered by style/trends. The value proposition to the buyer is what I think is lacking. We tried to generate sort of a board as a form of style inspirations, but it seemed the market doesn't really care about the mix and match of outfits. I guess what i realized too late is developing country markets are prioritizing price over style way more than developed countries
  - kaitai 10y ago
    Thanks for the further discussion. Definitely makes sense for the seller.
- eterm 10y ago
  I think people really underestimate the value add from "easy, free returns" for clothes shopping. I remember using ASOS 10 years ago and at that time most online retailers had poor returns policies. (Legally all must have a 14 day returns), but ASOS went further with free returns and even provided shipping labels and bags for returns with the original shipment. I think my then girlfriend returned maybe 70% of everything ordered, it was just how it worked. You'd browse, impulse purchase then see how it looks and probably return it. As a result they took almost all of her actual purchases. And because they provided shipping bags/labels/etc they no doubt reduced the turnaround time so they got stock back quicker and reduced the chance of lost or damaged stock they couldn't then sell on. I don't know but I hope that most retailers have caught on and provide similar now.
  - isoos 10y ago
    My experience backs yours. While living in the Bay, my wife bought most of the clothes through Macy's online interface, and we brought them back to the stores (we kept more than 60%). Moved out of the US, and we do miss the convenience of that kind of shopping, and would love to use similar services, even with premium.
HoopleHead 10y ago
built
- aherlambang 10y ago
  thanks, it's fixed.. my english is rusty
seibelj 10y ago
Thanks for your write up. After my own failed attempt I came to the conclusion that any product based primarily on aggregating products that others sell is a failed model. You are a middle man in an already thin-margin industry and are competing directly with shops (who are incentivized to have customers come directly to them and bypass you) and other aggregators. It would be better if you became a drop shipper and sold the products yourself. Much more control, and the audience you were building with ads would have stayed.
- w1ntermute 10y ago
  > any product based primarily on aggregating products that others sell is a failed model What about eBay?
  - seibelj 10y ago
    eBay is not forwarding you to third-party websites in order to purchase products. They are listing products directly. The company the author was creating forwarded you to someone else. In return the store paid a monthly fee. Essentially this company was targeted lead-gen, and stores paid a fee for them to do the work and drive traffic.
    - w1ntermute 10y ago
      My bad, I didn't realize the OP's company was forwarding traffic to a 3rd party. That's indeed a bad idea.
  - blcArmadillo 10y ago
    I don't think eBay is really an aggregation service; it's a platform on which people directly sell items. An aggregation service on the other hand goes out and finds shops already selling items through other platforms and provides one place where you can search all these shops. They would then presumably collect some sort of commission on sales.
- aherlambang 10y ago
  The point of having an aggregator is not to have a headache with stock keepings and shippings, on the other hand doing an aggregator leads you to have less control over the products and customer service. Each has its own drawbacks
godzillabrennus 10y ago
Building two sided marketplaces is no joke. It's really tough. If you decide to start something and it's a two sided marketplace be ready for a rough time.
- aherlambang 10y ago
  Apart from the rough time it needs a very long time to get the ball rollin.. it's even tougher to do in a market where the people are not ready yet
lossolo 10y ago
You were not first and will not be the last.
- aherlambang 10y ago
  I hope I am not... we still see new marketplaces coming up every day
wtvanhest 10y ago
> This just sounds so wrong to me. If you have a good product and it brings value, then others should be able to value it by paying you back for your product or services. Period. I completely understand this philosophy, but an attempt at building a two-sided market place is very likely going to require outside investors. This opinion that you need to be profitable from day one has been proven wrong repeatedly and while some 'unicorns' will fail or become less than worth $1bn, their achievements are still very real. It is 100% OK to want to build a business, but entrepreneurs should be flexible enough to understand when it is appropriate to raise money, or make a product that does not generate profit up front. For the record, I also attempted to create a two-sided market and I also failed. It was super painful and I hope you move on quickly with some really solid lessons learned.
- aherlambang 10y ago
  We did raise funding it was around $100k-$500k (not going to disclose the real amount). We realized that we needed some boost to test the market overall, but after 1.5 year of using that money and got to 30-40k UV per day, the path of profitability from that point seems far away, numbers just don't add up. It gets worse as I stated in the article that new startups in the same area are raising behemoth amount of funding. The funds were used to attract and subsidized sellers and buyers.
  - exelius 10y ago
    The hard part in building a two-sided market is getting users AND buyers on your platform. This generally means epic shit-tons of brand marketing to end users, which is where a lot of those millions of VC dollars go. There's really no way to get brand recognition otherwise -- you have to spend some ad dollars to inform users of your product. Ad spend is a zero-sum game from a competitive lens, so if your competitors are out-advertising you, they're going to win. And yes, this is why companies tackling two-sided markets focus on user acquisition over profitability. You were also trying to fix the wrong problem. Focusing on the user experience is the right call, but your mistake was saying "fuck this, the distributor model is so fucked we can't do it". Ok, if the supply chain of a specific industry is super-expensive, your business model should be to streamline it by going direct and undercutting everyone else (this is what Uber did). You needed to build a new distribution model. It's fair to say "I'm a college student and don't have time to fix this big problem" -- which is fair, supply chain problems like this are usually best left to people with experience in them or at least a passion for solving them.
gexla 10y ago
I couldn't imagine doing something like this in the Philippines, which I'm guessing is much like Indonesia. Nobody has credit cards to buy anything online. Credit card alternatives haven't gained traction. People use cheap alternatives to Western Union to send money. Nobody surfs the web except at internet cafes. And at internet cafes it's either FB or homework. Nobody aimlessly browses when they are dishing out money every hour. Nobody uses apps. Even those with smart phones only use FB, Instagram, games and a handful of other messaging apps. Even if they did want to use apps, cheap smart phones are out of resources after installing FB and the rest of the above mentioned. No matter the phone, everyone uses SMS. The postal system is shady. I never order anything online. I don't even have a proper address. I don't know how the postal system is able to deliver anything. There are exceptions to all of the above and these are likely your target market since they likely have money. But this is a small percentage. And speaking of money. Nobody has that either. I noticed the post mentions there are tons of Instagram shops. I have no experience with this, but the number of shops seems irrelevant to me. Anyone can start an Instagram shop, post pictures once in a while and largely be invisible. It seems that much more important would be the above logistical issues which would also be important in Indonesia. I imagine people selling through Instagram are much like the street vendors. They see no problem with being the 4th guy within an hour trying to sell you the exact same things as the 3 guys ahead of him while you are trying to eat a meal and drink some beers. They just don't try very hard. But any money beyond whatever income they have is better than nothing. A place like the Philippines is all about improvisation. I don't see how you could improve much on the Instagram / FB shop model. In the vast majority of cases, there is probably nothing there to improve because there is no activity. For those who do get it to work, it's probably good enough.
- melvinmt 10y ago
  It's definitely super hard, but not impossible. You should read [1] how Rocket Internet expands in developing countries: they hire their own couriers who go out, deliver and take cash at the door. This way they solve both the distribution and the payment problem. This is similar to how many of China's biggest ecommerce players operate, they all have their own distribution/payments systems. If the infrastructure doesn't exist, you need to create it. [1] http://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer http://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer
matrix 10y ago
This is interesting to me more because it's rare to see a story about someone building products for the Indonesian market, which is very large. To the author: I'd love to see an article with more about some of the challenges and opportunities you see in Indonesia for startups.
- aherlambang 10y ago
  I wrote about some challenges in doing growth hacking in my other medium post :)
educar 10y ago
Loved the article. I do not agree with the assessment that Silicon valley startups compete based on better products. In fact, it's quite the opposite. All the popular ones you have heard of have taken large amounts of money and subsidize their products a great amount. If you are a less funded startup, it is impossible to complete in such a scenario. In fact, you absolutely have to get lots of funding first, you have no choice. So yeah, you have the same problem everywhere and not just indonesia. At the end of the day, all is fair in love, war and business.
- riquito 10y ago
  I think you're both correct (or wrong ^_^). Silicon valley startups compete based on better products, but against well founded competitors.
  - educar 10y ago
    well funded competitors you mean :-) ? To be clear, I don't think silicon valley products are any better/worse than other bootstrapped products out there (ie. I was just speaking relatively). It's just that given the massive amount of $$, lots of effort goes into giving things for free and great marketing.
- adventured 10y ago
  > I do not agree with the assessment that Silicon valley startups compete based on better products. In fact, it's quite the opposite. All the popular ones you have heard of have taken large amounts of money and subsidize their products a great amount. You didn't support your position at all that SV startups do not compete based on better products. That's a very large claim to make without supporting it at all. Taking on large amounts of venture capital has no inherent correlation such that the product must invert on quality to the amount being raised. If that were the case, Airbnb would be an entirely unusable product, as would Uber. So far those products have functioned extraordinarily well, such that a mass-audience of average users has easily adopted them at warp speed. Uber overtook the entire US taxi industry in three years, if their product wasn't good that would have been impossible. > If you are a less funded startup, it is impossible to complete in such a scenario. In fact, you absolutely have to get lots of funding first, you have no choice. You're criticizing Silicon Valley startups for supposedly relying on large amounts of money to compete, then proclaiming that you can't compete without getting tons of funding first. You're outright stating that you can't compete on quality of product alone, then you hold it against Silicon Valley in your theory that companies there refuse to set themselves up for failure by taking on a lot less venture capital.
edwinnathaniel 10y ago
To the author: I really respect you for building a startup back home but this article feels more like a rant all over the place though. It also sounds like you don't really know the market in Indonesia and you're trying to replicate what you know about US/Silicon Valley market back home as-is and didn't achieve the result you were hoping for (I haven't seen anyone done that and be successful either). I know an owner/co-founder of a startup in Indonesia and they have diverse channels. Having said that, I wish you more success down the line.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Is he being ironic > I really hate to say this, but I am quite disappointed with the startup scene in Indonesia. In Silicon Valley, you compete fairly with each other through creating better products and services. People highly respect good products and services. In Indonesia, you compete with each other through $$$. The one who has the most cash in their bank will most possibly win the competition. All the hypergrowth startups are burning piles of cash with almost no sustainable way out.
- jldugger 10y ago
  Indeed, I remember the 90s being an era of random free shit for consumers, and I'm sure the cost of customer acquisition was high. Its not like that era was known for it's sound and stable business practices.
antoniuschan99 10y ago
Check out Lazada. It's pretty popular in that region
skewart 10y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like you were facing a really tough competitive landscape. Throwing in the towel sounds like a wise thing to have done. One thing I didn't totally get from the post is what exactly you were trying to improve about the shopping experience? It seems like there is a lot of room for improvement for both buyers and sellers. Could you have vetted sellers and/or tried to answer inane questions from buyers yourselves (acting like a web cache for popular requests), saving both parties the pain of waiting for a response? What if you offered some kind of reputation service? I'm sure you thought about this stuff, and I'm not saying any of this is easy. I just would be curious to hear more about how you thought through finding real, sticky product-market fit.
- aherlambang 10y ago
  Thanks man! From the buyer perspective we have made a special one-on-on online coaching session, where they can ask us anything for feedbacks on how to improve their shops. We gave a lot of suggestions to them but most just didn't take any action afterwards. We do have a reputation service. We verified each and every store by taking in their personal government ID. We show case their customer testimonials in their own shop page. Two crucial thing that we can't play with, price and quality of product :) Which is two of the most important thing needed for someone to make a purchase.
calcsam 10y ago
Well done. It is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. If you want to have better odds next time, I'd advise you to read Zero to One. Think about what your secret is. What are you trying to do, what do you know about, that no one else knows? Then do that. When you see lots of competitors, it's a pretty good bet you haven't found a secret.
- aherlambang 10y ago
  Always wanted to get a held of that book! Will definitely read it
johanneskanybal 10y ago
I think you are confusing startup with business, there's nothing wrong with a business if that really needs to be pointed out..
Animats 10y ago
"fashion social commerce marketplace."* "Fab" tried that. They were based in NYC, and blew through about $200M in venture capital before tanking. Did the author of this article know that? Did whomever funded him?

120 points by aherlambang 10y ago

I am a bit surprised that the article doesn't have any introspection about knowing the market (or not). It seems like the reasoning was: we want some money; women have money; women buy clothes; let's do fashion. It doesn't seem like there was much of a value proposition for the customer. Maybe the customer likes browsing Instagram. Maybe the customer asks all these questions (stupid questions as well as clarifying questions) to gauge how quickly a return would be dealt with if desired, to establish some info about company knowledge and responsiveness. (Buying clothes online is risky in terms of fit and fabric quality, especially with resellers.) How could a startup cater to the features of the marketplace instead of fighting them?

aherlambang 10y ago
The one I wrote was an over simplification. There are of course more than that. The value proposition to the seller were clear, we wanted to give them more exposure outside of Instagram, make their store be discovered by style/trends. The value proposition to the buyer is what I think is lacking. We tried to generate sort of a board as a form of style inspirations, but it seemed the market doesn't really care about the mix and match of outfits. I guess what i realized too late is developing country markets are prioritizing price over style way more than developed countries
- kaitai 10y ago
  Thanks for the further discussion. Definitely makes sense for the seller.
eterm 10y ago
I think people really underestimate the value add from "easy, free returns" for clothes shopping. I remember using ASOS 10 years ago and at that time most online retailers had poor returns policies. (Legally all must have a 14 day returns), but ASOS went further with free returns and even provided shipping labels and bags for returns with the original shipment. I think my then girlfriend returned maybe 70% of everything ordered, it was just how it worked. You'd browse, impulse purchase then see how it looks and probably return it. As a result they took almost all of her actual purchases. And because they provided shipping bags/labels/etc they no doubt reduced the turnaround time so they got stock back quicker and reduced the chance of lost or damaged stock they couldn't then sell on. I don't know but I hope that most retailers have caught on and provide similar now.
- isoos 10y ago
  My experience backs yours. While living in the Bay, my wife bought most of the clothes through Macy's online interface, and we brought them back to the stores (we kept more than 60%). Moved out of the US, and we do miss the convenience of that kind of shopping, and would love to use similar services, even with premium.

HoopleHead 10y ago

built

aherlambang 10y ago
thanks, it's fixed.. my english is rusty

seibelj 10y ago

Thanks for your write up. After my own failed attempt I came to the conclusion that any product based primarily on aggregating products that others sell is a failed model. You are a middle man in an already thin-margin industry and are competing directly with shops (who are incentivized to have customers come directly to them and bypass you) and other aggregators. It would be better if you became a drop shipper and sold the products yourself. Much more control, and the audience you were building with ads would have stayed.

w1ntermute 10y ago
> any product based primarily on aggregating products that others sell is a failed model What about eBay?
- seibelj 10y ago
  eBay is not forwarding you to third-party websites in order to purchase products. They are listing products directly. The company the author was creating forwarded you to someone else. In return the store paid a monthly fee. Essentially this company was targeted lead-gen, and stores paid a fee for them to do the work and drive traffic.
  - w1ntermute 10y ago
    My bad, I didn't realize the OP's company was forwarding traffic to a 3rd party. That's indeed a bad idea.
- blcArmadillo 10y ago
  I don't think eBay is really an aggregation service; it's a platform on which people directly sell items. An aggregation service on the other hand goes out and finds shops already selling items through other platforms and provides one place where you can search all these shops. They would then presumably collect some sort of commission on sales.
aherlambang 10y ago
The point of having an aggregator is not to have a headache with stock keepings and shippings, on the other hand doing an aggregator leads you to have less control over the products and customer service. Each has its own drawbacks

godzillabrennus 10y ago

Building two sided marketplaces is no joke. It's really tough. If you decide to start something and it's a two sided marketplace be ready for a rough time.

aherlambang 10y ago
Apart from the rough time it needs a very long time to get the ball rollin.. it's even tougher to do in a market where the people are not ready yet

lossolo 10y ago

You were not first and will not be the last.

aherlambang 10y ago
I hope I am not... we still see new marketplaces coming up every day

wtvanhest 10y ago

> This just sounds so wrong to me. If you have a good product and it brings value, then others should be able to value it by paying you back for your product or services. Period. I completely understand this philosophy, but an attempt at building a two-sided market place is very likely going to require outside investors. This opinion that you need to be profitable from day one has been proven wrong repeatedly and while some 'unicorns' will fail or become less than worth $1bn, their achievements are still very real. It is 100% OK to want to build a business, but entrepreneurs should be flexible enough to understand when it is appropriate to raise money, or make a product that does not generate profit up front. For the record, I also attempted to create a two-sided market and I also failed. It was super painful and I hope you move on quickly with some really solid lessons learned.

aherlambang 10y ago
We did raise funding it was around $100k-$500k (not going to disclose the real amount). We realized that we needed some boost to test the market overall, but after 1.5 year of using that money and got to 30-40k UV per day, the path of profitability from that point seems far away, numbers just don't add up. It gets worse as I stated in the article that new startups in the same area are raising behemoth amount of funding. The funds were used to attract and subsidized sellers and buyers.
- exelius 10y ago
  The hard part in building a two-sided market is getting users AND buyers on your platform. This generally means epic shit-tons of brand marketing to end users, which is where a lot of those millions of VC dollars go. There's really no way to get brand recognition otherwise -- you have to spend some ad dollars to inform users of your product. Ad spend is a zero-sum game from a competitive lens, so if your competitors are out-advertising you, they're going to win. And yes, this is why companies tackling two-sided markets focus on user acquisition over profitability. You were also trying to fix the wrong problem. Focusing on the user experience is the right call, but your mistake was saying "fuck this, the distributor model is so fucked we can't do it". Ok, if the supply chain of a specific industry is super-expensive, your business model should be to streamline it by going direct and undercutting everyone else (this is what Uber did). You needed to build a new distribution model. It's fair to say "I'm a college student and don't have time to fix this big problem" -- which is fair, supply chain problems like this are usually best left to people with experience in them or at least a passion for solving them.

gexla 10y ago

I couldn't imagine doing something like this in the Philippines, which I'm guessing is much like Indonesia. Nobody has credit cards to buy anything online. Credit card alternatives haven't gained traction. People use cheap alternatives to Western Union to send money. Nobody surfs the web except at internet cafes. And at internet cafes it's either FB or homework. Nobody aimlessly browses when they are dishing out money every hour. Nobody uses apps. Even those with smart phones only use FB, Instagram, games and a handful of other messaging apps. Even if they did want to use apps, cheap smart phones are out of resources after installing FB and the rest of the above mentioned. No matter the phone, everyone uses SMS. The postal system is shady. I never order anything online. I don't even have a proper address. I don't know how the postal system is able to deliver anything. There are exceptions to all of the above and these are likely your target market since they likely have money. But this is a small percentage. And speaking of money. Nobody has that either. I noticed the post mentions there are tons of Instagram shops. I have no experience with this, but the number of shops seems irrelevant to me. Anyone can start an Instagram shop, post pictures once in a while and largely be invisible. It seems that much more important would be the above logistical issues which would also be important in Indonesia. I imagine people selling through Instagram are much like the street vendors. They see no problem with being the 4th guy within an hour trying to sell you the exact same things as the 3 guys ahead of him while you are trying to eat a meal and drink some beers. They just don't try very hard. But any money beyond whatever income they have is better than nothing. A place like the Philippines is all about improvisation. I don't see how you could improve much on the Instagram / FB shop model. In the vast majority of cases, there is probably nothing there to improve because there is no activity. For those who do get it to work, it's probably good enough.

melvinmt 10y ago
It's definitely super hard, but not impossible. You should read [1] how Rocket Internet expands in developing countries: they hire their own couriers who go out, deliver and take cash at the door. This way they solve both the distribution and the payment problem. This is similar to how many of China's biggest ecommerce players operate, they all have their own distribution/payments systems. If the infrastructure doesn't exist, you need to create it. [1] http://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer http://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer

matrix 10y ago

This is interesting to me more because it's rare to see a story about someone building products for the Indonesian market, which is very large. To the author: I'd love to see an article with more about some of the challenges and opportunities you see in Indonesia for startups.

aherlambang 10y ago
I wrote about some challenges in doing growth hacking in my other medium post :)

educar 10y ago

Loved the article. I do not agree with the assessment that Silicon valley startups compete based on better products. In fact, it's quite the opposite. All the popular ones you have heard of have taken large amounts of money and subsidize their products a great amount. If you are a less funded startup, it is impossible to complete in such a scenario. In fact, you absolutely have to get lots of funding first, you have no choice. So yeah, you have the same problem everywhere and not just indonesia. At the end of the day, all is fair in love, war and business.

riquito 10y ago
I think you're both correct (or wrong ^_^). Silicon valley startups compete based on better products, but against well founded competitors.
- educar 10y ago
  well funded competitors you mean :-) ? To be clear, I don't think silicon valley products are any better/worse than other bootstrapped products out there (ie. I was just speaking relatively). It's just that given the massive amount of $$, lots of effort goes into giving things for free and great marketing.
adventured 10y ago
> I do not agree with the assessment that Silicon valley startups compete based on better products. In fact, it's quite the opposite. All the popular ones you have heard of have taken large amounts of money and subsidize their products a great amount. You didn't support your position at all that SV startups do not compete based on better products. That's a very large claim to make without supporting it at all. Taking on large amounts of venture capital has no inherent correlation such that the product must invert on quality to the amount being raised. If that were the case, Airbnb would be an entirely unusable product, as would Uber. So far those products have functioned extraordinarily well, such that a mass-audience of average users has easily adopted them at warp speed. Uber overtook the entire US taxi industry in three years, if their product wasn't good that would have been impossible. > If you are a less funded startup, it is impossible to complete in such a scenario. In fact, you absolutely have to get lots of funding first, you have no choice. You're criticizing Silicon Valley startups for supposedly relying on large amounts of money to compete, then proclaiming that you can't compete without getting tons of funding first. You're outright stating that you can't compete on quality of product alone, then you hold it against Silicon Valley in your theory that companies there refuse to set themselves up for failure by taking on a lot less venture capital.

edwinnathaniel 10y ago

To the author: I really respect you for building a startup back home but this article feels more like a rant all over the place though. It also sounds like you don't really know the market in Indonesia and you're trying to replicate what you know about US/Silicon Valley market back home as-is and didn't achieve the result you were hoping for (I haven't seen anyone done that and be successful either). I know an owner/co-founder of a startup in Indonesia and they have diverse channels. Having said that, I wish you more success down the line.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Is he being ironic > I really hate to say this, but I am quite disappointed with the startup scene in Indonesia. In Silicon Valley, you compete fairly with each other through creating better products and services. People highly respect good products and services. In Indonesia, you compete with each other through $$$. The one who has the most cash in their bank will most possibly win the competition. All the hypergrowth startups are burning piles of cash with almost no sustainable way out.

jldugger 10y ago
Indeed, I remember the 90s being an era of random free shit for consumers, and I'm sure the cost of customer acquisition was high. Its not like that era was known for it's sound and stable business practices.

antoniuschan99 10y ago

Check out Lazada. It's pretty popular in that region

skewart 10y ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like you were facing a really tough competitive landscape. Throwing in the towel sounds like a wise thing to have done. One thing I didn't totally get from the post is what exactly you were trying to improve about the shopping experience? It seems like there is a lot of room for improvement for both buyers and sellers. Could you have vetted sellers and/or tried to answer inane questions from buyers yourselves (acting like a web cache for popular requests), saving both parties the pain of waiting for a response? What if you offered some kind of reputation service? I'm sure you thought about this stuff, and I'm not saying any of this is easy. I just would be curious to hear more about how you thought through finding real, sticky product-market fit.

aherlambang 10y ago
Thanks man! From the buyer perspective we have made a special one-on-on online coaching session, where they can ask us anything for feedbacks on how to improve their shops. We gave a lot of suggestions to them but most just didn't take any action afterwards. We do have a reputation service. We verified each and every store by taking in their personal government ID. We show case their customer testimonials in their own shop page. Two crucial thing that we can't play with, price and quality of product :) Which is two of the most important thing needed for someone to make a purchase.

calcsam 10y ago

Well done. It is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. If you want to have better odds next time, I'd advise you to read Zero to One. Think about what your secret is. What are you trying to do, what do you know about, that no one else knows? Then do that. When you see lots of competitors, it's a pretty good bet you haven't found a secret.

aherlambang 10y ago
Always wanted to get a held of that book! Will definitely read it

johanneskanybal 10y ago

I think you are confusing startup with business, there's nothing wrong with a business if that really needs to be pointed out..

Animats 10y ago

"fashion social commerce marketplace."* "Fab" tried that. They were based in NYC, and blew through about $200M in venture capital before tanking. Did the author of this article know that? Did whomever funded him?